This article first appears in Vol. 33: Collective.

I

I
know there are children who grow up fixating on their wedding
day or graduation ceremony, bar mitzvah or quinceañera. Happily,
during my early teens, I was allowed to obsessively anticipate my
first music festival. At 15, I was finally given the miraculous nod
of approval to travel from Belfast with my friend Evelyn to Reading
Festival. It changed my life. Of course it did; this is precisely
what music festivals were intended to do.

I wore baggy Carhartt skater trousers with an “ironic” child’s
Barbie T-shirt over my shiny Wonderbra (the padding pockets were a
great place to stash a crumpled tenner). I crowd-surfed to Rage
Against the Machine. I subsisted entirely on a box of Farley’s
Rusks, impressed by the prominently displayed nutritional content,
promising an abundance of riboflavin and thiamin. I kissed a tall,
hairy French 21-year-old who looked like he could be in The
Smashing Pumpkins. I met a crowd of impossibly cool older kids who
were all planning to go and work in bars in Ibiza afterwards, which
seemed the epitome of worldly sophistication. And I danced
alongside thousands of people, in a field, bonded by a deep love of
music and a shared desire to have a simply fabulous time.

I admit it was the music and hedonism that lured me through the
security gates, but festivals work magic on the souls of music
lovers, and that weekend meant so much more to me than a glorified
gig. Festivals are platforms for influencing behaviour through the
power of a progressively spirited collective, and I’d had three
days exposed to new experiences, new people, new lifestyles, new
habits, new political opinions.

During 2020, many snide comments have been made about “spoiled”
millennials being bereft at missing out on a party or two. This
devalues the impact festivals have had, not just on our cultural
capital, but our socio-political landscape. Festivals are among our
greatest cultural riches; it’s devastating to think we might risk
losing this.

Britain is arguably the most music-obsessed country on the
planet. Music is in our blood, an everyday obsession, a gloriously
democratic privilege, a signifier not of status but of sensibility.
As food is to Italy, so music is to Britain; a pervasive, universal
passion. In the UK you could easily find yourself chatting to a
15-year-old schoolgirl with an encyclopaedic knowledge of Frank
Zappa records, a taxi driver who knows the lyrics to every Dolly
Parton song, a school dinner lady who drives home to Black Sabbath.
Music is a secondary language that every one of us understands, and
for a small island, our contribution to pop music is wildly
disproportionate. Britain can’t claim to be the birthplace of the
music festival, but in the 20th and 21st centuries, our political
and cultural landscape has been shaped more significantly by music
festivals than any other nation’s.

The first documented music festival was the Pythian Games, a
precursor of the Olympics, which was held from the late sixth
century BCE at the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi. Athletics were
the main event, but it included musical competitions. During the
Middle Ages, musical festivals marked the agricultural calendar.
But the image most of us have in our heads when we picture a music
festival first formed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and since
then, they’ve played pivotal roles in civil rights movements
including so-called “women’s lib”, anti-racism and LGBTQ+
rights.

Woodstock Festival – billed as “an Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days
of Peace & Music” took place in 1969, on a dairy farm in
upstate New York. Max Yasgur, a 50-year-old Republican leased
the land because he felt he could help bridge the generation gap
and quell political tensions, particularly concerning the Vietnam
War. “I’m a farmer. I don’t know how to speak to 20 people at one
time, let alone a crowd like this,” he said when he addressed the
masses on the final afternoon, just before Joe Cocker’s set. “But I
think you people have proven something to the world… that a
half-million young people can get together and have three days of
fun and music and have nothing but fun and music. God bless you for
it.” Yasgur was right; Woodstock spread a message of unity that went far
beyond the perimeters of the farm, and progressed a number of
social-protest movements of the 1960s – opposition to the Vietnam
War, a push for free love and personal autonomy, a commitment to
civil rights and equality.

In Britain, Andrew Kerr, the co-founder of what became
Glastonbury Festival, put on a free music festival after attending
the more commercial Isle of Wight festival in 1970, announcing:
“Man is fast ruining his environment. He is suffering the effects
of pollution; from the neurosis brought about by a basically
urban-industrial society: from the lack of spirituality in his
life. The aims are, therefore: the conservation of our natural
resources; a respect for nature and life; and a spiritual
awakening.”

These aims sound lofty, but festivals are allowed to be lofty,
radical, experimental. The modern music festival was conceived as
an intervention – a few days to shake up politics, our mental
health, our lifestyle choices. Festivals are concerts,
performances, parties, but they are also experiments in better ways
of living as a collective; pop-up civilisations that thousands of
revellers – entire generations – inhabit for a few days. Just three
days can be enough time to change someone’s life, our mindset, our
habits, whether it’s a spontaneous decision to try naked yoga, eat
vegan food or dress in drag. More recently, Shambala was the first
midsize British festival to go entirely meat and fish free; in
2019, I was at Glastonbury’s first plastic-free festival, which
weaned 175,000 people off single-use plastics in a weekend.
Festivals work a form of gentle activism, nudging people out of
whatever emotional, physical or political ruts we might be in.

No matter how many festivals I went to, I emerged transformed –
and grubbier, and sleepier – by each one. I don’t want to imagine a
future me, without the tweaks and improvements and embellishments
that every festival makes. And collectively, we should be fearful
of a future without festivals. Festivals are incubators for
societal change. We need them more now than ever. Just because
festivals are fun, it doesn’t mean they’re not serious.